@Hippojay I have my server in the attic out of the way but TBH it not that noisy (using Antec 300 case) it's actually quieter than my pc - i'm slowly looking at upgrading the drives so all red 3TB drives (current 3TB drives installed are red) - would be good though if 3TB SSD were available at a good price

also my os is running of a usb drive so all internal sata ports free for drives

I used the hacked BIOS to enable full speed on the CDROM port and looped back the esata for a further 'internal' drive.

As i have so many drives, I can sometimes get bizarre vibration noises when they are all spinning up. I have two external 4 bay icybox enclosures, so i've put the whole lot under a vibration damping mat, which helps. Ultimately i'd like to swap out for larger disks, and have my eyes on the 6TB ones. I could then move from 13 disks to 5 - although i would also be very poor..

My plex server hardly misses a beat though - it tirelessly serves out data, be that raw or transcoded - the library is automanaged and it's not often i have to manual adjust a title. In comparison, XBMC is a lagging behind with library management. A poor interface (i.e. your TV), that requires third party tools to really get the data right. Library sharing is a mismash of messing about with mysql. I can see what they are attempting, sticking to the open standards (such as DLNA/uPNP) - but it's not as flexible as Plex. But, because some of TeamXBMC (or should that be TeamKODI now..) have such fierce hatred for Plex, then I can not see them diverging much into that framework.

XBMC is a great player though, much better than Plex (although I've not used PHT) - the old plex client would regularly choke on some media and was massively out of date.

Hmm - that might read like a rant.. Again, one of the reasons I don't get invlved anymore.